Self-Ashtualisation

   Hi everyone 💖 How are you (booked up) today? Are you all booked up by work or by books? If it’s the former, you are in the right place and if it’s the latter, by what books – fiction or non-fiction? If you have been reading too much non-fiction and need a break to prevent your no-longer-all-fired-up-brain from being all fried up, check out this post , in which I recommend eleven electric novellas under 200 pages that will hopefully help you relax, restore and/or reset your brains, so that you are back on your productive feet. If you have been reading too much fiction and desperately in need of a dramatic change of scene or a change of the dramatic scene you keep finding yourself finding however, I can assure you, without an ounce of doubt, that you are reading the right post indeed.    ‘Wait, what about us, those who are far from booked up in any sense of the phrase? Have you forgotten us, you foolish writer of this post, hmm?’ That, my friends, is the sound of the Greek chorus

When I socialise, demoralised over cup after cup of glass-half-full non-caffeinated virtual hot beverage, I am immediately uncoupled from my twin flames, myself and I, so who’s left? Me. Burnt out. Black-coffeed. Dramatically dehydrated. I hug my burnt-black-coffee self with my loose arms, muscles relaxed, but steady as bookshelves, momentarily armed, moneyed, materialised with breathing, reading material. Bye-bye or rather welcome (back), sugar!  

   Whenever I shared my life progress with her, a mentor, keenly interested in my growth, would often respond, ‘Your learning curve is huge.’ As a highly sensitive individual, I would often analyse and reanalyse the meaning of those words. What I have found over the years is that even now, my views on what they mean keep changing, depending on what’s happened in my life and how I’ve responded to those events. For instance, if I feel down in the dumps when something, for want of a better word, bad happens, I would perceive ‘your learning curve is huge’ as extremely patronising and condescending, the way a cocky adult might say, ‘Grow up and buck up, kiddo,’ or ‘You’re still young and inexperienced. You know nothing,’ to a child or a younger adult. Occasionally, I would even regard the sentencing sentence (yes, me and my daft pun again) as a backhanded compliment, something along the lines of, 'Ooh! You've learnt an unbelievable lot for your age, haven't you?' When some